SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days on on the road. Let's travel never looking back.

Happy New Year MFM fans. This is of course producer

SPEAKER_06
Ben and for this episode we just wanted to share some of the best interviews from this year. So as I went through and looked at every single interview there was really tough to pick to whittle it down. There were some really great interviews this year including a lot from Q1 and Q2 that I had forgotten about.

So I wanted to resurface some of those remind you of them give you a little sampling a few little segments from those interviews and hopefully they spark something remind you of some parts that you loved and you can go back and listen to some of those interviews. So first up we've got MrBeast and Hussin Minhaj live from Camp MFM talking about their work styles.

SPEAKER_08
Is your company ran like a normal company at all? Well and the reason I was asking was because my employees sometimes would complain that I'd be like too aggressive changing things too much but you seem more aggressive than I am. Yeah and for a certain type of person they like that but for you to achieve your goals you're gonna have to have a lot of people and then every once in a while process and every once in a while infrastructure and every once in a while planning. Are you a

SPEAKER_07
perfectionist? Well of course. Yeah I just like to make the greatest YouTube videos possible and that's that's literally all I want so yeah I mean if it's not the greatest video I just won't upload it. It's after you scrap a few videos we kind of everyone you know just kind of starts to figure it

SPEAKER_03
out. Does it scare you that you can't stop? Do you ever feel like damn I'm like I'm just throwing all these coals on the yeah on the embers of the algorithm? I like to use better analogy it's like a

SPEAKER_07
treadmill we're on like 12 like 12 speed and I've been going out a couple of years. No it doesn't scare me but so like I was telling him the way I like to work is like I like to go basically wake up obsess over something go to bed wake up obsess go to bed like every second of the day until I just have a mental breakdown at burnout and then I like take a day off or maybe a day and a half off and I like to go right back to it so I don't like work certain days I just go as hard as I can every ounce of my entire body until I just crash and somehow that's sustainable. What time do you

SPEAKER_03
sleep? Right now usually around three am. Wow and then and then you get up at like whenever I they

SPEAKER_08
tell me what to do I don't think I'm shocked at like the numbers so like some big numbers for revenue for your other businesses yeah and you have to have infrastructure for that and so that's why I was wondering I was like because you are like this oh gotcha yes on the stereotype you're like this crazy creative person who's disorganized and that's perfect yeah but to sell that much of candy and or of burgers like you gotta be yeah so those are all separate in teams so

SPEAKER_07
for our snack brand we hired Jim who helped build our X bar and we built the team around him so that's a whole independent company that doesn't even work out of our studio and same thing with BeastBurb so that's the beauty I like to just find people who are just the best they got damn well at their job and then just empower them and give them money and so how many people work at the studio? In the studio like 60 because we don't have enough space to fit everyone so that's why we're trying to build more but building things just take forever. Do you do people like working

SPEAKER_08
for you you think? The reason I'm asking is like these like creative types I'm like curious about like because because it's not like a normal company where it's like we are all trying to achieve this

SPEAKER_03
it's like no we're trying to make me big. I've been on both sides of it where I'm on John Stewart's show I'm on Trevor Noah's show so I'm like I'm facilitating somebody else's show and then I've been on the other side of it where it's like no it's my special it's my show it's my movie or whatever so there's also certain projects where I'd be like I'd love to learn from you so there's been shows and movies that I've done like The Morning Show like I've never done a sexy one-hour drama I want to learn from Reese Witherspoon I want to learn from Jennifer Anderson I want to learn from the show creators like how do you do that how do you shoot that what's that lens what are you doing that is that a 50 is that a 75 how did you do that tracking shot why did you do that tracking shot let me see the script let me see the future script there's all these things where I'm like I just want to absorb I just want to see how you do the whole thing you know what I mean like and that's an additive like positive value for me because most people don't have that access to that

SPEAKER_07
you know I mean the sample is Tariq gotta meet his idol today oh man bro Tariq Tariq you gotta set

SPEAKER_04
the bar yeah we had told them that you were coming today to the thing and like the look of disappointment when they saw it was I was the only brown guy there they're like that ain't hustles they're like yo they're like yo hustles change bro and they're like what the fuck the camera

SPEAKER_03
really does that Ted Bilel bro yeah I don't do that bro don't do that don't do that

SPEAKER_08
all right if you're listening to this pod that means you're pretty entrepreneurial you're like me and Sean and I'm actually in this situation that I'm reading this ad all about right now I'm actually starting a new company and surprise I'm using HubSpot why because basically when I started a bunch of my earlier companies we had a website we had an email service provider we had all these other systems and we kind of combined them and ducted them into one service but in reality HubSpot does all these things all in one and it's pretty affordable because you're not paying for tons of different services and that's actually what I'm using for my new projects so HubSpot's in all the one solution it connects all the data and all of your tools together because it's all actually in HubSpot HubSpot does it all this means you don't have to worry about the management and cost of multiple solutions HubSpot's easy for everyone to use so your teams can spend more time on what matters most now I know when you're hearing this ad you're thinking Sam you're just reading a script well you're right I am but in reality I actually use HubSpot on all my projects I said it once I'll say it again and it's been awesome it's just cheaper to use one thing that has everything that I need and it's significantly easier things don't break because you're trying to connect things that aren't supposed to be connected so check it out learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com next up we've got Palmer Lucky the founder of

SPEAKER_06
Oculus and Andarill talking about the founding of Oculus and what that was like what it was like to sell and why he decided to sell to Zuck and to Facebook. But this is a podcast that started

SPEAKER_04
it's called My First Million because we're interested in money and we think it's really funny that the Silicon Valley thing is you have to pretend you don't like money and like you know

SPEAKER_05
I know you're talking about yeah you know we're not doing it here for the money you know this money money's you know money money's not the real objective I actually tell my own employees and onboarding that if you work in a place where your boss is saying that you should be worried because it's one thing it's one thing to say that to the press it's one thing to say that in your marketing materials but you you know if your employees don't believe that at the end of the day you're trying to make their job a fiscally responsible decision if you're effectively telling them you could be making more money elsewhere and your financial success is not my

SPEAKER_04
priority you should be concerned. Yeah yeah exactly and you kind of did the best of both like for all the kind of ironic people who are like we're trying to change the world with this like HR onboarding software you know you actually kind of did and still made a bunch of money doing it

SPEAKER_05
so you know it's not like an either or either. I 100% I mean when I started Oculus it was not because I thought it would be the thing that would make the most money there had never been a successful VR company in history to be clear and I did it because it was something I was really passionate about now that said one of the things I'm most proud of in my whole career is that everyone who worked at Oculus achieved financial independence because we were able to build something incredible and like I feel great that everyone who was part of that mission and who supported me early on was able to make a bunch of money and then a lot of them have gone on to do incredible things but yeah Oculus was not was not was not done because I thought it was the best way to make money it's because I thought it really was going to be the best way to change the world in the long run. Andrel was a little different I that one it wasn't just oh this will be fun I want to do something really cool.

Andrel was like I felt like I had to do it or things were things were going to go really poorly so more more of a more of a stick than a carrot on that one. How much did you make off the Oculus sale? Oh man I probably shouldn't say because this is also one of those complex things where you know there was the there was the sale so there's what they believe they called the merger consideration portion of the of the compensation and then they you know you cut an employment deal where they say we're going to pay you you know this much for five years I can say that I was locked I was locked up on a five-year vesting schedule so typical would be four most of our employees were four I got locked up for five because I was a key guy and that that money technically is not for the acquisition it's just yeah I had that too yep so and of course you know you can't you can't pretend you can't say they're the same thing or they they're supposed to be treated differently tax wise compensation wise and then of course there's the bonuses we had we had an earn out that was a it was a it was a it was a huge earn out it was hundreds of millions of dollars for the founders of the company if we could hit certain sales targets and user hours of time targets and we actually had four years to hit those targets and we we hit them within less than two years so we actually did it's kind of funny we'll be like oh man the acquisition must not be going as well as people expect is like no we maxed out the top bracket of our earn out because we're we're kicking butt but anyway it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars I can tell you that in the healthy hundreds of millions of dollars a bunch of people

SPEAKER_04
who listen to this are founders and like would want to sell their company someday both me and Sam we started this podcast right when we both exited our companies because it's like all right we're kind of earning out well we can't start another company right now but like oh we can start a podcast that sounds kind of fun and actually yet just yesterday I just closed on another sale of a company but these are small scale compared to what you did right like congratulations thank you but you sold for I don't know two or three billion bucks how does that happen somebody you know zuck comes over to your house and is like I'll give you three billion dollars for this like how does that how does that conversation go down when when when you're talking about the sort of like

SPEAKER_05
the grand slam type of outcomes well it's a it's a long story but you know I know I know Sam didn't want to talk all about VR but I can tell I can tell you that no I can't this shit's interesting to me oh great we do we don't want to talk about VR optics and the metaverse that but I guess on the business side of it the interesting thing about the acquisition is that we didn't have any of intention of selling initially when we first had our conversation with Facebook and I think that really was a positive thing because actually first time we talked I think basically we were offered a billion dollars to sell and we said no we're not interested we think this company's easily going to surpass that value we think it's not going to be a problem for us to make more money and we're happy to work with you guys but we we don't want to be by the way was that was that easy

SPEAKER_04
to say no to a billion dollars I mean you started this thing like on a Kickstarter dude like you know at some point were you like was it hard to say no or was it not not an issue at that point it

SPEAKER_05
wasn't an issue for me and I think I think different people had different opinions I mean look if you if you look over my career I've made a lot of similar decisions like when I was starting Oculus when I was deciding whether I was going to do a Kickstarter or work for someone else I actually had a job on a job offer on the table from Sony to run a PlayStation VR lab you know out of PlayStation group and when I turned them down they actually doubled the offer and then I had to turn them down again and a lot of people were wondering how could you have done that you know how could you have decided to do your own thing it was so much higher risk and I think that a lot of it is is social programming you know I grew up watching media that conditioned me to believe that when you have an opportunity you have to take it when you know when you almost have to follow the narrative and looking back I'm not sure I could have done anything I was like could I have stayed in school instead of starting Oculus once I realized I had this breakthrough in VR technology I think I could not have possibly done it there's it's almost to the level of free will not existing I could not have chosen that could I have gone to work for Sony looking back I don't think so I think I couldn't have made that decision and I think it's actually the same thing with that billion dollar offer like I almost could not have said yes you know like that that that first offer I like narratively it makes no sense it doesn't align with what I've been trained is what you do when you're a you know when you're a free thinking iconoclast and so I couldn't have done it I think what what happened is a few things changed over over time after that initial offer you know we didn't talk to to Facebook for for for a few months after that and a few things happened one it became clear that our competition was not only serious but was going to be putting massive dollars into their success something not a lot of people remember but I certainly do because it was a big deal in my mind the day that we announced no the day we find it wasn't anyway now it's the day we finalized the Facebook acquisition was the same day that Sony announced PlayStation VR and we had known that it was coming for a while we we we actually even shown each other prototypes and stuff but it really reinforced this was a serious thing we're gonna have some of the biggest games companies in the world putting hundreds of millions of dollars into competing with us and that made the the pitch that Facebook came back with which is listen you maybe you could make more money as an independent company but if you're with us we're gonna make VR happen much faster so at you yes you'll you might make more money but you're going to go much slower than if we were able to artificially supercharge your growth far beyond even what you could do with venture capital and they were willing to commit billions of dollars a year for a period of a decade or more and that's that's a really tough thing to turn down when you really believe in something and is this like

SPEAKER_04
literally zuck coming to your house and talking about this or is there like an army of lawyers in between you guys that are like no it was bankers and and corporate people it was a very small

SPEAKER_05
number of people i mean it was it was i mean i think that the the the lawyers and the accountants are much more likely to be involved in a deal when the deal is contingent on you know your revenue and your multiples and your pnls like that that's where you need to drag those people in to really make a an assessment this was such a high level bet it's not like oh i think that you have this margin on your headset and you've sold this many development kits it was so early and the technology so naysay the real bet is do you believe in the metaverse do you believe that there's going to be a virtual world parallel to our own when you're living and you're working you're playing and then most importantly do you believe this is the best team in the world to do it and i didn't know this at the time but i found out later that mark had been going around and talking to various university research labs government research labs talking to a you know seeing what other companies were doing and their conclusion was we were way ahead of everyone else and that if if this was going to happen this shift to immersive computing the final computing platform arguably that we were the people in the best position to do it and that's not something that a lawyer can really give an opinion on it's not something that an accountant can put a value on it's a it's a

SPEAKER_06
it's a very high level bet all right next up we're going to go to an interview with dharmesh Shah the co-founder of HubSpot this whole interview is gold but here dharmesh is talking about starting to start up during an economic downturn and it's really about more than that it's just about it's just about startups in general and what is crucial for success if you go to paulgram.com

SPEAKER_04
slash bad economy um is the name of the blog post and he makes this case where he goes the economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in first stretch as bad as the mid 70s which is when microsoft and apple were founded and as those examples suggest like a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup but he which you've heard before but i thought there's one interesting part was he goes i'm not saying it's a good time either the truth is more boring the economy doesn't matter much either way for a founder starting a startup and i actually thought that was a really good point because i hear this so much just like i'll talk to kind of young founders and they listen to twitter and they listen to podcasts and they listen you know they listen to kind of these like a lot of it's like you know vcs who are you know also pandemic experts and also you know you know macroeconomists as well and so they hear and then they sort of start to adjust their plans and their mental models and like their room for everything it's like dude if you're a startup you're like an ant in this world does the ant care what's going on with the presidential election no like you basically just need to build a product you need to carry a little piece of dirt it's like build a product get a customer get 10 customers like it doesn't matter if the if the economy is bad if you can't get 10 customers it's not gonna work anyways and so i thought it was a great little blog post talking about like kind of starting a startup during the downtime which is where i think we're about to or we just officially entered a recession again so yeah i was curious

SPEAKER_09
darmesh do you have any thoughts on that yeah so my position is i lean more towards kind of a paul gramb and the spectrum which is i think it's either neutral that it doesn't matter it's one of things you're suggesting towards positive and the positive elements of being in a kind of downturning economy or recession is that things become available that would not have been available to a startup before like talent it's like oh well there are people sitting at meta facebook or sitting at google right now that may be reevaluating their lives or they may have just been let go from a venture backed company that raised 200 plus million dollars right so now you've got this talent that's coming on the market that might not have come on the market before things that were super expensive like buying google adwords or certain marketing channels because you have this glut of money and a lot of venture capital you know i think of venture capital as a very efficient machine of turning like money from lps into google adwords rep you right that's uh they're just a conduit between the two and as in a downward economy you're going to get less of that kind of glut of money flowing in which drives the cost overall down for certain things that i think are important to entrepreneurs so i'm i'm generally net positive that a down economy is actually a

SPEAKER_08
relatively good time to start a startup for like the last 18 months or you know whenever like the last 24 months whenever things been booming i've uh my wife works at airbnb and uh you know i've got a lot of friends that work at hub obviously hub spot and all these and john was at twitch so we have like some some perspective on how on the salaries of big companies and i've seen some of these salaries and they are crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy as the as like a leader and uh the biggest shareholder of husband and you like see these see these numbers are you thinking to yourself like this like we can't afford to pay someone like an entry level person 250 000 dollars a year i don't know how this is gonna work like what what's your perspective on that when when these salaries are going so high and now it's like a little bit normal more normal yeah but as a startup i mean

SPEAKER_09
you can't afford those salaries anyway right unless you're one of those kind of rare exceptions that has 50 plus million dollars going out of the gate which is uh very very rare and so you know one of the things a founder has to kind of get good at it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing which is join you in your startup right and if you can't if you can't do that if you can't make that sale which is the most important sale you'll make is being able to kind of track people and then its customers um it's not going to work so you have to do one we have two things either recognize kind of superstar talent and give them something they can't get um because it's beyond confidence like oh you'll learn more here oh you're going to do your own startup someday this is the place to get your startup MBA because you'll be exposed to a bunch of things you'll meet your future co-founder of the company those kinds of things um either you have to do that or you have to say i'm going to be really good at identifying diamonds in the rough people that have not made it to the 200 plus 300 thousand plus dollar salary yet but they will someday i caught them early in their kind of evolution and so i can get them there's that's so it has to be one of the other form of arbitrage otherwise you can't play the game that's just not uh i don't think it's viable

SPEAKER_04
i i'm doing uh when you're saying that it's like resonating so much because it's basically you all the three things we just talked about i'm doing it's like i started the milk road in january this year and so it's you know six it's been it's about to be six months or it's been six months and um it's like here let me start a crypto company right when crypto crashes you know like 70 80 percent and at the beginning ben even my co-founder ben he was like you know um the only thing i can see going wrong is if crypto goes in a bear market i go well crypto's gonna go to a bear market like that's like one of the few certainties of crypto is that it goes up and down and when it does it is dramatic in both ways it goes from the elevator is dramatic in both ways and i was like you know so it's just a question of like do what do you think that kills it or do we just make it through like there's that's really all we have to think about here um so that was the first part of starting in a bad economy the second one on talent was i recently hired this guy and he quit a pretty well known uh venture backed company that i think it just raised maybe 50 or 100 million dollars and he joined and i talked to him a little bit before he joined like he was thinking about doing his own startup he had we had traded a couple emails nothing serious just he he was wanting to use his product then he took a job at this place all right whatever i forgot about him then he emails me and i shared this on twitter he emails me subject line i have made an irreversible decision and i was like okay i gotta click this what's inside and he's like i just quit my job and i think you should hire me and i was like okay direct into the point and he tells me why blah blah and so i was like all right boom i'm sold very bold approach i already liked your hustle before this because when you were hustling to try to get me as your customer i was like this guy's good so okay let's do this and i made him a job offer which was not like you know a silicon valley job offer but the guy lives in san francisco he was working for his silicon valley startup so he was like uh dude that's like a 50 percent pay cut and i was like um and i didn't i didn't say this out loud but in my head what i what i felt i i told him i was like that's what i could afford a pay right now and like look you come crush it the sky's the limit but like that's what i can pay you right now uh sight unseen and i said and in my head i was about to tell him the the line that i heard from warren buffett you guys probably heard the story but when warren buffett goes and tries to work for his you know kind of hero or whatever ben graham and he's like you know i'll work for you for free and ben graham goes your price is too high sir which is which is the truth which is the idea that you got to shadow ben graham and work side by side with him every day was you should be paying for that if you really want to be like a successful investor that's how i felt and i didn't want to say it because it's kind of arrogant but like dude if i take you under my wing my team is like three people if you become one of those three and you're working out of my he came out of my house yesterday you're sitting by me working out of you know side by side every day like really i'm providing more value to you than you are providing to me at that point and like there's still a you know i i i appreciate the the value bring but let's like the the dollar amount is um like the salary dollar amount is not what not the value you're getting and i think he knows that intuitively and that's why he said yes but like uh that ben graham story will stand out family no no he's a young young guy just graduated from college but here's the thing i think people

SPEAKER_09
have a couple of thoughts on that one is the salary slash compensation is just one vector of value that you get from a company that you join right another one that you get is you get the learning whatever it is that they get exposed to another one that you get is a network that you build while you're there right so there's all these other things that also in kind of an aggregate and maybe i think it's common for people to over index on the compensation or the kind of current compensation um and under index on other things that um and then there's just the just raw emotional value you like being around the people that you're around uh do you enjoy the idea that you're working on like is it you know those things matter as it turns out um i have a fun hubspots story so when we started on this compensation thing uh you know bryan i had to pick salaries for ourselves something more than zero and so we picked five thousand dollars a month right it's like okay well that's it's a it's a number um and uh obviously below market value we'd been out in the market for a while and had worked in our lives so when we hired employee number three um we had to decide what we were going to pay them five thousand dollars hired employee number four five thousand dollars and so we just like okay if you're here for the salary you're here for the wrong reason right that that's not why you're going to join this motley crew of uh folks and that lasted for like a while it's like we and then we and then it kind of has this inertia built in where it's like okay well all of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join the company are all paying each other i mean paying ourselves five thousand dollars a month now what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making five thousand dollars of course that doesn't

SPEAKER_04
last forever and you have to uh what was the pitch at that time so it's not like you know no offense to to hubspots but it's not the sexiest idea you're not saying we're building the electric car here you know like you didn't have that going for you um you know you might have had a like a you know your own magnetism which is like you know like for me i get this cheat code because like this guy he listens to the podcast and this happens this podcast is a great talent pipeline for us because people will listen to it over time they just they decide for themselves either i think this guy's a dummy and he annoys me or i think this guy's smart i really like you know i'd love to be hang out with these guys i think i could learn a bunch from them and so it becomes an unfair advantage but you didn't have that back in the day so what was your how did you convince people to do this five thousand dollar you know lego block of salary building so we cheated a little bit right because

SPEAKER_09
of the first eight people in the company seven of them uh came out of MIT Sloan the same school that brah and i went to and we met in class so it was kind of in network kind of thing it's like okay well it's just a bunch of friends that sort of know each other in network or whatever let's like let's go do this thing right and it's also and they were kind of far enough along in their careers that they were not missing meals or anything like that right they had just gone to you know business school or relatively uh good business school and and so that was it second then the other thing and this is the uh part there's equity but there's also the like this is not that risky dude like let's say this doesn't work out and we end up being chumps with the ideas really bad three six months from now you will basically be able to pick up where you left off right there's like there's no loss other than the opportunity cost of those three to six months this is not like a irreversible lifetime decision that i've made this call and that's all i'm gonna have to be able to do for the next five or ten years um and that was enough all right everyone today's episode is brought

SPEAKER_08
to you by marketing against the grain if you want to know what's happening in marketing then this is the podcast for you the hosts are kip bodner whose hub spots cmo and karen flanigan whose hub spots svp of marketing on the pod they share their unfiltered marketing expertise one of my favorite recent episodes was called why creators are disrupting marketing kip and karen talked to steph smith who's been on my first million a ton about all things creator economy they ask her how you can find a niche audience how to create great content for them and how to monetize that content and if you know steph smith you know there's no one better at that type of stuff so if you love marketing you want to know what's happening at the cutting edge of the world of marketing go listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcast all right do you want to invest in the real estate market but you're unsure how to do it in a housing correction i get it it's confusing time to jump in but let me tell you something experience real estate investors know that these type of uncertain markets often called transitionary markets are some of the best times to find opportunities all you need to know is what strategies and tactics work in these market conditions and if you're not sure what those are you're in luck because bigger pockets just release a report full of real estate investing trends analysis from 2022 plus suggested strategies to help you win in 2023 whether it's your first investment or your 50th download the state of real estate investing report from bigger pockets it's completely free and you can find it at biggerpockets.com slash invest 23 that's biggerpockets.com slash invest 23 okay next up we have an

SPEAKER_06
interview with peter levels this was one of our most downloaded episodes of the year and it's because it was a really great interview and in this segment he's talking about what it takes to

SPEAKER_08
become a successful solopreneur so what's the total size of all your of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom line revenue and isn't it true that you're the only full-time person

SPEAKER_01
and how many contractors are you using yeah so i have one customer support contractor part-time isabel and she works for all my projects and i have a moderator for the slack group because to slack groups they there's some drama in there like i've had some crazy drama in these slack groups in communities so you need to have a moderator you need to have rules and you need to have a you can just automate this moderation away like i tried that but you need a real person there to you know check on messages and stuff and then i have a dev ops guy he's my best friend daniel and he works kind of like a s l s s l a like a service level agreement where if the server goes down he gets a message you know if i'm sleeping with something he brings it back up but the problem is it never goes down anymore like it doesn't we haven't really had that for years so he does security updates and stuff you know like because i have a vps i don't use amazon i use a vps on digital ocean and line out and he kind of keeps that stuff safe you know so that's good and how big is the business top line so how big is the business um so remote a k is the job board it's the biggest uh business makes the most money nomad this is starting to grow though it's like it's past i think 100k this month 100k a month um so almost like a million dollar business um remote a k is 1.6 million a year i think um and rebase is a new business it's an immigration agency so i want to help remote workers immigrate to countries that want to attract remote workers with like you know beneficial tax stuff uh portugal is one of the first ones to do that um so those are the three business really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a lot like the book makes like uh i think like 4k a month so but everything you do is part of one flywheel so

SPEAKER_04
i've looked at your kind of like system and i've looked at a bunch of people because i got into a little pickle where i was like god i'm doing so many things and i want to do all these things i'm interested in all these things but shit you know am i going to be able to juggle five different things i got a podcast i have a vc fund i have my e-commerce business i have a newsletter business i have um you know i don't even know what else core business i got another shit right and so it's like am i going to be able to do this and what i saw that you did i like i have this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur nobody's actually solo everybody's got like a little support team around them that's like helpful some some in a big way some in a small way but basically it's like somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit builds a successful business and lifestyle around that and what i noticed was that you had this formula which is i don't know if it's intentional or unintentional but i'll say it out loud because here's my my read of your business it's basically you have you starts with the red pill so a red pill is like you know that scene in the matrix where morpheus is holding out a blue pill red bull is like you know do you want do you want the truth or do you want to you take the blue pill you could just go back to your normal life just as everything was you could forget this ever happened and he was like no i need to know the truth what's the truth he takes the red pill and basically it's like every great solopreneur i think starts with one truth so like tim ferris's truth was basically that like the nine to five work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like f-ing broken and you don't need to do it that way like you could work four hours a week and live like a millionaire and so i was like tim ferris's red pill and yours was basically like this is the idea of being a nomad a digital nomad um which is like hey yeah you don't have to you know prescribe to the subscribe to the the normal way of living you pick a a place that's where you are from that's where you live and you pay you know you just kind of stay where you grew up and like and you go to an office every day and like you have to wear shoes and whatever you're like no i wear flip flops i walk around on beaches i just kind of go wherever i feel like whenever i feel like and i carry a little like backpack and that's my life um yeah so you start with the red pill then you then you create content around that red pill so is you talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything from like hey people always ask what i put keeping my backpack for the day here's what it is it's like there's every bit of content you can come up with that's like poppy that's like fits that red pill so then you become that bit gives you authority on that subject so you become like a authority authority and so you know pomp became an authority around bitcoin and tim ferris became a authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many businesses that can come up with it but every one of those businesses either it's a big moneymaker or it's just another funnel and more content more new audience that's gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about and so it even though you're doing six things they're all actually part of one flywheel and every one that you do is you're gonna feed it either because it's gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle in a better bigger and better way or it's gonna give you new content new stories new things to be known about that fit that lifestyle as well that's how i see it i'm curious is that a good is that true

SPEAKER_01
words that not and and my thing started when i was i was blogging just like you said i was blogging about like nomadding but i was blogging for my mom because back then you had like travel bloggers like 2014 and i was going to travel kind of and nomad and i wanted to you know every place i went i wrote a little i was this city to live in and stuff and what happened all the crazy that happened to me and my mom was reading that but i wrote it in english because my mom was obviously dutch but i was like okay she can read english so it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff more audience but it wasn't like super like a big idea just kind of happened and then those blogs started showing up on hacker news and i started writing more about like bootstrapping startups as a nomad in in thailand or something or in asia and those started going on hacker news really high and i think that was the time it was like 2014 2014 there was a time when i noticed that the developers in san francisco work for all the startups they also were realizing okay maybe i can start doing this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and nomadding was not cool back then because you had the tim ferris wave in 2008 it was like the first nomad wave but there was i loved him ferris but there was something about the the followers there and the the the business that were created they were kind of like like shady there was a lot of shady shit i met i came across in asia in thailand like americans and europeans it was like a lot of brain supplements and shit like dude yes yes dude yeah drug dealers online drug dealers and like spam dexing and like there's still shady shit but less and i was like i really hate this shady shit i don't feel like part of the scene uh i think it would be cool to make it more like uh you know mainstream like reputable businesses reputable jobs that do it um so i kept blogging about it and it kept taking off on hacker news and uh and you're right i think and then i went on twitter and i think i kind of organically people started following me and then uh a lot of people went nomad a lot of my friends went nomad because i was blogging and they became my friends now um and yeah and then i started all those businesses and but i think it's it's not like some it sounds very like a constructed it's not a master plan no it's not a master plan it's very organic like uh i kind of try i'm like user zero i try to build stuff for myself and i always have like i have like new ideas like there's just like you said red pill there's like something there's a disconference in society and what i'm thinking and most people then think like okay there must be wrong something there must be someone wrong with me but i think like arrogant i think there must be someone wrong with society maybe this is like a new thing so i'll try and make a little website about it like inflation like three years ago or two years ago i was tweeting about inflation like this shit's gonna go crazy with all the fat printing money and everyone's like nah inflation is fine stop stop whining about it i'm like no i'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher so i made this inflation chart.com website that shows inflation numbers are really high turned out to be true kind of now so

SPEAKER_08
yeah that's great what what uh technology are you using to build those sites because they all do look alike and you seem like you can spin spin them up like really quickly well that's really

SPEAKER_01
funny because i get a lot of criticism for for the technology i use i use php because that's the language i knew because i was making a blog like right like WordPress so i knew php a little bit so i was like okay i just need to write with the language i know because i don't know other languages and i did that and then i use a javascript and i use jcury so everybody starts laughing now because jcury is like way passé but i still use it because it's so easy to you know make a button bind an event to it age xj to the server to the php script does something with a database sends it back and it works for me really well and i think it doesn't matter what you use but as long as you use something that's really fast um feedback loop and iterative loop where you can really quickly develop like i can make a new button in like you know 20 seconds and deploy to the server and it's really fast and i know other developer friends of mine use a very big stack all this you know gubernets and all this stuff all these keywords i don't really know and for them it takes sometimes like you know an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature and i think what we learned from startup and lean startup is that the customer feedback um loop has to be very the feedback loop has to be very fast iterative so you can really quickly change stuff and it also makes your customers really happy because they see something they have a problem or a feature idea you can really quickly build it and then they see it and that's i mean if you want happy customers that's how you get it you make something for them they're like oh my god i influenced this product and uh yeah so that works for me so very very simple stack all right and then last up we've got

SPEAKER_06
alex hormosi talking about sales tips and what it takes to be a great salesperson you one of my

SPEAKER_04
favorite things from you is uh these little tick tocks or shorts i see where you're giving like a sales tip or a little sales trick or whatever and um i would love for you i think most people probably you know most people who are listening to this just you know the bell curve of people listen to this probably have spent you know zero time trying to improve their sales and have not seen some of these things so i want to give them the opportunity where they don't got to go click and find this random tick tock that i'm talking about in the ocean of tick tock i want to role play a little bit um give us kind of like um give us an example of normal like here's the default way people are doing something and here's the rephrase of the reframe that has better results i would love to to give get two minutes of learning sales from alex

SPEAKER_02
sure and just as a quick caveat to complete the loop from like 40 minutes ago you said like what was the book or training or whatever that so it's my belief if you look at belford you look at bradley you look at grand cardone some of the big sales trainers that are out there almost all of them invariably have the same story which is i started selling and was the best guy on the team by a fucking mile and then i tried to figure out what i was doing and so i do think that some people naturally based on their childhood their upbrings their whatever or just have a higher proclivity

SPEAKER_08
for selling with a gift a gab and an empathy yeah and i think it carries over into how you recruit

SPEAKER_02
for selling too because we've built a lot of sales teams and i actually have a very short allowing for people to fail at sales cycle probably much shorter than most people and it's just because i've never had a killer salesperson who didn't do pretty well the first week and so for me we you know we turn through this quickly but as a result of that the team is just killers and they know that so i like this quote from from grand cardone but he says you know my sales seems a dangerous place to work and i i love that so in terms of uh sale stuff i think that i think people don't know how people are really freaked out about the idea of selling right and so i think the first reframe is like you're not selling you're helping someone make a decision that's going to help themselves and the the the front part of that is that i do think that the number one predictor of good sales is conviction and so fundamentally you have one person who should believe in something another person who does not believe it yet and trust is the thing that transfers that conviction so if fundamentally there's the two things you need you need trust and you need conviction most times sales people don't have a hundred percent trust i'm sorry a hundred percent conviction and so the also the idea of conviction as a binary is false so it's not like i believe it or i don't believe it it is to what extent do i believe it right and so that's why like in terms of if i want to improve a sales team i can do the drills which we do and that's like blocking and tackling but the thing that really juices a sales team is hearing the testimonials of the people that they sold last week and what they're doing today and how their lives have changed and so i noticed this because on my sales teams when we were in person whenever i did way out day which is when everyone finished their challenges and everybody was crying and so excited i tried to stack as many sales appointments as i could while people were weighing out and during those days we closed like a hundred percent because people were like dude how can you not think this works it's right there and so the thing is is like you can either trick yourself into having the right tone or you can train yourself and i think that it's much easier to trick yourself into it by just simply believing because if you talk if you truly believe in the product you will talk about it differently and so in terms of an understanding of selling if you need to have conviction you need to have trust trust is going to come from expertise and some level of rapport right and so um i think that overarchingly to help someone sell we just have to ask the right questions to get someone to come to the conclusion of their own and so most sales conversations follow more or less the same framework if you know what you're doing otherwise people are just chasing their tail and trying to chase the prospect to an outcome that the prospect doesn't know how like we've had this conversation a hundred times they have only had it once we should be the one knowing how this conversation is supposed to go right we should also come in with a massive advantage to how to have this conversation go the way we wanted to because we do it on a fucking day right and so you know big big front end pieces is like why are they there what's the problem what have they done so far understanding where they failed seeing why our product is different from the things that they failed asking for permission to explain about the product explaining the product not in any way based on features but only based on the experiences that they will have as a result of it and using analogies to explain those experiences right um and then and then having a close at the end which the the tiktok i think that you you references like a no base close and i think a lot of natural sales people do this anyways like if i want something i'm like hey can you do this for me i'm like hey would you mind and they say no they don't know it right like this natural communication dynamics that most people who naturally know how to persuade people or at least influence do that on their own this is just retroactively looking at it saying what did i do different like why is this different and um in terms of like overcoming because people are afraid of confrontation right that's what they're afraid of and so i believe that you can solve without ever having confrontation and you can do that with what i like to call childlike curiosity and so if someone says um well my husband's not going to approve that i'm like why wouldn't he if what he like huh that's so interesting tell me more about that rather than like all right let's like your husband's an asshole like that's not going to work because in arguments no one wins right and so you're like why why would he think that because because i would think that he wants what's best for you right yeah he wants what's best does he know you're struggling with this right now well i mean yeah he knows i'm struggling with it okay so he wants what's best for you knows you're struggling with it so why do you think he would be opposed of solving something that that you're currently struggling with just so i understand would he be happier if you continue to struggle well no it's like well great then would you be opposed to moving forward today and that way and hey if you go home to your husband then you make a joke in the light and scenario and then you close it right and so it's i think childlike curiosity is the immediate that you have to train because people get defensive so that is one thing that like fighters talk about when they're in the ring like in the beginning you breathe in too much right i don't know if you like if you've been like sparring and stuff like you breathe in you breathe too much you hyperventilate and so the guys who've done it enough they slow down their breathing because when they get things get intense they can slow it down and so i think sales is a lot the same way where you're like your adrenaline kicks in sharp breathing faster it's fight or flight so you gotta be able to slow it down and be like huh that's crazy i wouldn't have thought that okay tell me more about that and like now you're interested and then they don't feel like you're combating them they feel like you genuinely are interested and want to help them which is what you should be doing because you

SPEAKER_06
should be selling them only if it makes sense okay uh i hope you enjoyed the sampler platter of some of the best interviews of 2022 thank you to jimmy husson palmer darmesh peter and alex and thank you to all our guests this year it was a really great year thank you to all of you to our listeners uh we couldn't have done it without you we're so happy to see the growth of the show and

SPEAKER_00
happy people are responding so happy new year and we will see you in 2022